My Talk At Devsum 2016 And Some Interesting JavaScript Links

Hi! Last week was intense!! I came back from spending a greeeeat long week in New York, powered through jet lag and a nasty cold and did my talk at Devsum 2016 about the mysterious, arcane and obscure art of JavaScript-mancy!

It was a ton of fun as usual. The conference was awesome, the organizers did a great job, everything ran super smoothly, the speakers were very kind and great to hang out with, the attendees were engaged and great to have a random conversation with here and there, and the people at Active Solution were a blast to be around. So thank you everyone for making it happen!

I think my talk went pretty well although perhaps there was a little bit too much information and speed towards the end. You’ll be able to be the judge of that because there’s going to be a recording coming out in the near future (which I am looking forward to watching myself by the way hehe).

Anyhow, here are my slides and a bunch of useful links that serve as a superb companion for the presentation.

And the links in a similar order to the slides:

Part I. JavaScript Arcana (weird parts of JavaScript that are unexpected and very different to C#)

Up until very recently (ES6) JavaScript variables have had function scope. This does not only affect how we declare and use variables but with the lack of modules elevate the role of functions to that of a basic building block for JavaScript applications. Not only a way to encapsulate a small piece of functionality but as a fundamental way to structure JavaScript programs.

Interested about which features are coming to JavaScript? Is async/await coming soon? Decorators? Cancellable Promises? Observables? Then take a look at the ECMAScript TC39 repository at GitHub which contains information about all proposals and their current status.

There’s a lot to object oriented programming in JavaScript. You’ve got a lot more options than just doing classical inheritance like you are accustomed to in C#. Take a look at this interesting series of OOP articles that not only show you how to do classic OOP in JavaScript but also a lot of alternative techniques that truly take advantage of JavaScript’s prototypical inheritance and dynamic nature.

Part III. JavaScript Tooling (Modern Web Development Tooling has come a loooong way)

There’s a big gap between the ideal world in which we would like to develop application (ES6+, SASS, LESS, postCSS, automation of different tedious tasks, etc) and the real world with the features that are supported in browsers or other JavaScript runtimes. We need something to bridge the gap, and that’s what modern web tooling is here for:

P.S. There were great speakers at the conference and awesome talks about the hololense, bots, IoT, Azure and anything that you can imagine. My colleagues from Active Solution talked about VSTS, Azure Remote Apps, Harnessing the power of Azure using JavaScript and taking advantage of the IoT Hub with lego mindstorms. I’ll keep you posted as soon as the videos are up so you don’t miss them!

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